Written by

Public hearing schedule

Two years ago, Jill Dykstra woke up after a particularly bad attack by her longtime husband, left for work and never returned home.

She since has spent many months in court wrestling not only with a divorce but with the legal challenges of prosecuting her now ex-husband with domestic abuse. Prosecutors eventually let him plead guilty to assault, rather than domestic assault, which carries tougher penalties.

“That probably was the most devastating thing as a victim,” Dykstra said. “I wanted people to know that this wasn’t someone who had been in a bar fight; this was someone with a history of family violence.”

Dykstra told her story Wednesday evening at Sioux Falls’ Main Branch library during a public hearing before a legislative summer study committee charged with looking at what changes, if any, should be made to the state’s domestic violence laws.

For the past two years, legislation to update the state’s murky definition of domestic violence has stalled. One reason for those failures, according to committee chairwoman Sen. Deb Soholt, R-Sioux Falls, has been a lack of public input, something the summer study intends to gather.

“If we’re going to make changes to statute, we need to have public input,” Soholt said.

South Dakota’s domestic violence laws use a somewhat scattered, unclear definition of what domestic violence actually is, according to Krista Heeren-Graber, executive director of the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault. A consequence is that the legal system sometimes misses the point of why the law was written in the first place, she said.

Domestic violence is not about anger or frustration but power and control, something South Dakota’s current law says little about, she said. In fact, the criminal statute is written such that a pair of college roommates could get into a fight and be charged with domestic abuse.

But if a couple is in a dating relationship and one of them becomes violent, it could not be considered domestic violence unless they are living together. That might make it more difficult for the victim to obtain a protection order, and the abuser would not be held accountable for domestic abuse charges.

Wednesday’s hearing was the first of four planned public hearings the study committee will hold at locations across the state this month. The findings will be combined with research gathered during two previous work meetings the committee held in Pierre in an effort to form any legislation the group thinks is necessary. The committee’s final meeting is scheduled for Sept. 4 in Pierre.

“Our job is to look at the statutes and ask, ‘Is it enough to protect the people of South Dakota?’ ” Soholt said.